Tag Archives: SmartHub

Samsung TV’s Not-so-SmartHub just cost me an hour of my life that I’ll never get back. If you have a Samsung television with SmartHub as of the moment of this writing, your Smart TV is acting pretty dumb. I got home from work and fired up the TV to entertain my daughter while I made dinner. I hit the SmartHub button and go for Netflix. The error message “Network interference occurred. Please try again later.” is all that I can get out of my TV. I start troubleshooting the network. I’m messing with the firewall. I’m pinging and trace routing and packet capturing… I’m pulling out every trick in my IT Guy playbook, and nothing makes sense. It’s own diagnostics say that the local network is good but it can’t reach the internet. I’m watching at the firewall, and it’s not even trying to reach the internet. It just flat-out refuses!

I solved the puzzle, but I had to revert to Facebook to do it. Samsung TV USA’s Facebook page (more specifically, their “posts to page” section) is rife with posts and comments of angry TV owners, all having the exact same issue as I am! A little more digging on Google, and it turns out that Samsung TV’s try to talk to their own SmartHub servers. If it can’t, then it refuses to do anything. No Netflix. No Pandora. No Hulu. Nothing. Zip. Zero. El Zilcho.

Why the hell do these things require that Samsung’s servers are in working order? Good question, but it’s one that I’ll certainly be taking into consideration when it’s time to buy my next TV. There’s no way in Hell that I’m paying for all the “Smart” features, if they have to do something so stupid as to call home to Samsung before they’ll work.